Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Letter to Olive Press Re Left Wing Lies about the Tea Party

Dear Editor:

Your page 31 editorial ("Phoenicia Needs a Sewer System", April 8) makes good points, but the Tea Party has no position on the Shadaken/New York City sewer conflict. The only link, as you correctly aver, is a "wave of communal angst", angst that has reasonable foundations given the Obama administration's radical spending.

The Obama administration's spending increases are an order of magnitude greater than any administration in the past 62 years, including the big-spending, pro-war Bush administration. Whereas non-military federal spending has been between 16 and 18 percent of gross domestic product (gdp) since the election of President Reagan in 1980, President Obama ratcheted the federal spending level up to 20 percent of gdp last year. President Obama's outlays as a percentage of gdp constitute what statisticians call an outlier. In contrast, during the Korean War non-military spending was in the range of four to six percent of gdp. Taxpayers' backs are already against the wall. Tea Party members are hard working people who are under attack from Washington and Albany.

The Obama administration wiped out 30 years of the Republicans' moderate discipline in a single year. President Obama put spending back on the steeply increasing slope it had been on until 1980. The Republicans exercised moderation in reducing programs out of respect for Democrats who are still loyal to primitive social programs of the 1930s to 1970s. But the Democrats have shown contempt for libertarians and Republicans in their radical spending increases. The Tea Party is a reasonable reaction to (a) the failure of Republicans to cut failed programs and (b) the Democrats' contempt for all who disagree with their high taxes.

The 20 percent Obama outlier is just the beginning, for the health care bill will not realize savings. The proposed cap and trade bill will magnify gasoline and fuel costs, and will push many lifetime Olive residents out of the region and into city housing projects as fuel costs are tripled. Hence, the Tea Party represents a realistic response to the Democratic Party's radical spending plans.

Jill Paperno claims that the Tea Party has "corporate bosses." The three founders of the Olive Tea Party do not have corporate bosses. I work for New York State and Johansen is a retired county employee. Someone at my health club claimed that Fox News and Glenn Beck are our bosses. In fact, I do not watch television news. Several Tea Party posters have been torn down or defaced with swastikas and insulting language. My relatives in Hungary and Russia were murdered in the holocaust. Since I am a cofounder of the Olive Tea Party, I would like to ask those who are drawing swastikas to consider that you are the ones who are like Nazis, who did not tolerate disagreement.

The original name of the Nazi Party was the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeterpartei) but Hitler changed the name to National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The abbreviation, NSDAP was shortened to Nazi. The Nazi economy was run entirely on socialist grounds. Hitler's 25 point program included improvements in national health insurance. The Germans were the creators of both the welfare state and of national health insurance. Hitler was a socialist who differed from Marx, Lenin, Castro or Mao chiefly in his substitution of Jew for capitalist (a substitution that Marx himself had suggested in his "On the Jewish Question") and the swastika for the hammer and sickle. Like Stalin, Hitler illegalized gun ownership.

The Tea Party rejects socialism, including Nazism. Nazism is closer in form and substance to the ideology of the Obama administration than to anything in the Tea Party. Perhaps those of the left who preen themselves about supposed originality that not having read Locke, Smith, de Jouvenal, von Mises, Hayek, the anti-federalists, or Montesquieu, your thinking and that of the Democratic media strikes us of the Tea Party not as original, but as dull, authoritarian, uninformed and indeed, insipid.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.